10/5/2012: Obama's rise is no surprise to Nashville woman who worked with him

Yvonne Lloyd said even in his early days in Chicago, Obama fought for change

Oct. 5, 2012

The day after their first debate, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney return to the campaign trail. Obama waves as he arrives at a campaign rally in Denver on Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012. / Ed Andrieski / Associated Press

President Obama's friend, Yvonne Lloyd, reminisces...: President Barack Obama's friend, Yvonne Lloyd, reminisces about friendship her friendship with Obama in Chicago, before he became president.

Yvonne Lloyd, right, shown here with her daughter Pamela, worked with President Barack Obama when he was a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s. 'We knew there was something about him,' she says. / John Partipilo / The Tennessean

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The title page of Yvonne Lloyd’s hardback copy of “Dreams From My Father” features a personal note from the memoir’s author, who was a young Chicago lawyer and aspiring politician at the time.

“To Yvonne — One of my favorite people in the whole, wide world!” the inscription reads. “Barack Obama 8/4/95.”

Lloyd, a Nashville native who lives here again after nearly 40 years in Chicago, has known the president for more than half his life. She sat on the board that interviewed him for a job as a community organizer in Chicago in 1985, hired him and then worked alongside him to pester government bureaucrats and fight for better living conditions on the city’s South Side.

Twenty-seven years later, the man she remembers as “my little old skinny boy” is in another, infinitely more visible fight, running for re-election to the nation’s highest office. As he returns to the campaign trail after a poorly regarded debate performance, he does so this time around as a familiar figure.

Millions of people know him — or think they do. Yet his days of working to get asbestos removed from housing projects, before he went off to Harvard Law School and long before he ran for an Illinois Senate seat, can be hard to imagine.

But Lloyd, an 83-year-old widow who lives about a mile north of the state Capitol, doesn’t have to imagine them. She remembers. And Obama’s subsequent ascent, while meteoric, doesn’t surprise her.

“Once he came and told us what he was about, what he wanted to do and how he would go about doing the community organizing, everybody voted for him,” she says of Obama’s job interview with the Developing Communities Project, which also considered two other applicants. “We knew there was something about him because he was so precise and thorough. Everything we wanted to go do, he’d say, ‘I’ll research it.’ ”

The president’s long-term impact on Chicago is debatable. In a recent Washington Post story, Mark Allen, a community organizer who worked with Obama in the 1980s, expressed disappointment that he hasn’t used the presidency to do more for the kinds of neighborhoods he once knew so well.

“We haven’t seen much of the (economic) stimulus trickle down to our people here,” Allen told the Post.

But Lloyd, who attended Barack and Michelle Obama’s wedding on Oct. 3, 1992 — she proudly showed visitors the small card that accompanied her place setting at table No. 4 — remains a true believer.

“He’s a remarkable young man,” she said of the president, now 51. “He was. He is.”

Asbestos at Altgeld Gardens

In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama writes about meeting Angela, Shirley and Mona, “spirited, good-humored women” who lived just west of Altgeld Gardens, a Chicago housing project, and attended a Catholic church inside the project. Obama changed the names of most of the people in the 1995 book “for the sake of their privacy,” he wrote in the introduction. “Shirley” is Yvonne Lloyd.

Lloyd and the other two women, whose real names are Loretta Augustine-Herron and Margaret Bagby, doted on Obama, trying to make sure he kept his thin frame nourished. Author David Maraniss, whose biography of the president’s early years was published in June, describes them as Obama’s “usual aunt-buddy trio,” a dynamic confirmed by Lloyd and others in her family.

“He didn’t have any family in Chicago, and they felt like it was their duty to make sure this man ate four times a day,” said Lloyd’s son Sedgewick, 48.

While Obama lived in the more upscale Hyde Park neighborhood, his work for the Developing Communities Project regularly took him further south to Altgeld Gardens. He interviewed residents and wrote about their concerns in reports known as “one-on-ones,” Maraniss writes in “Barack Obama: The Story.”

Then, in 1986, Obama saw a newspaper notice that said the Chicago Housing Authority was advertising for the removal of asbestos from the housing project manager’s office. Around the same time, Maraniss reports, an activist based at another South Side project found workers removing asbestos from the housing authority’s offices there.

Concerned that Chicago officials seemed to care more about protecting their own workers than public housing residents, Obama and other organizers pulled together residents from the two projects, including Lloyd, to take a bus downtown and confront the city’s housing director, Zirl Smith. They didn’t get to see Smith that day. But they did get the housing authority to promise that Smith would attend a community meeting at Altgeld Gardens two weeks later — and that asbestos tests would start quickly.

The experience was heady stuff for Obama.

“I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way,” he wrote.

The community meeting with Smith didn’t go as smoothly as Obama and the residents had wanted. But Lloyd said Obama, rather than trying to speak for her and the other residents, helped them gain the confidence to tell city officials and foundation leaders what they wanted.

“He’d say, ‘Oh no, you all are the ones who are leading this. I’m opening the door for you. Now you’re gonna have to walk through,’ ” she recalled. “I had never made a presentation in my life. And he taught me how.”

But the asbestos wasn’t removed from Altgeld Gardens until after Obama left Chicago for Harvard in 1988, Maraniss writes. In his own book, Obama wrote that he and his colleagues met with a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development official a month or so after the community meeting in 1986.

The official laid bare the federal budget realities they would have to live with.

“You can have the asbestos removed,” he told them. “Or you can have new plumbing and roofing where it’s needed. But you can’t have both.”

In a recent interview, Maraniss said Obama’s Chicago years ultimately showed him “the limits of that kind of work outside the system,” nudging him toward electoral politics.

A good listener

Lloyd said Obama was always good at listening to other people’s stories and then doing research to figure out where they needed to go and whom they should talk to. She said living with his maternal grandparents when he was growing up helped him understand what people who were getting older were dealing with.

“The main thing when people are in trouble like that, and they need help, is for you to listen,” Lloyd said. “You don’t tell them what they need; they tell you.”

Some of Lloyd’s memories have a lighter side. She remembers Obama going into the homes of “eccentric” older people who would hoard or, in her words, “hold onto things.”

“We’d say, ‘Barack, why were you at that lady’s house?’ And he’d say, ‘She makes the best pie.’ I’d say, ‘You ain’t eating that!’ But everybody just loved him because of the way he was. He was so open and understanding.”

Lloyd and her son Sedgewick, a Nashville radio show host, laugh about the beat-up car the future president drove as a hole yawned in the rear floorboard — presumably the same vehicle Michelle Obama mentioned in her Democratic National Convention speech, when she talked about going on dates “in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door.”

Sedgewick Lloyd knew just what the first lady was talking about.

“I could see the concrete passing me, which was something different,” he recalled. “But he was the type of person, it didn’t matter about his personal things. That wasn’t what really drove him. He had a larger idea in mind.”

Maraniss said Yvonne Lloyd, Bagby and Augustine-Herron (who remains one of Lloyd’s closest friends) played a critical role in Obama’s early adulthood.

“I can’t stress enough how important she and some of her friends were to Barack Obama,” he said. “They made him feel comfortable in the African-American community for the first time in his life. They helped ease him into feeling fully comfortable.”

Lloyd, who has 11 children, 24 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren, clearly enjoys her small place in history. She noted that she has been written about in three books: Obama’s memoir, Maraniss’ biography and Edward McClelland’s “Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President.”

“I never thought I’d personally know the president of the United States,” she said. “I’m so happy to be able to talk about him as a person.”